The Canadian Maritime provinces are associated with many flavourful delights. Seafood, potatoes, and the wines of the Annapolis Valley. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find some of the best apple orchards in the world, sprawling endlessly alongside the vineyards of Nova Scotia. Nestled on Main St. in the downtown district of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, a small, and evidently thirsty, university town whose population of about 4,000 usually doubles during the school year, sits the Annapolis Cider Company. Spotlight on Business spoke to owner Sean Myles about their almost two-year- old business, the region, their business philosophy, and of course, their unique ciders.
By John Allaire H ow did the Annapolis Cider Co. come to be? My wife and I have always been very passionate about the local food movement. We lived in Europe for quite a long period of time and that’s where my wife did her apprenticeship as a winemaker. We’re both from the Maritimes originally — she’s from Cape Breton and I’m from New Brunswick. We saw what was happening in Nova Scotia with the wine industry. There were things happening there that were exciting and we knew it was bound to grow. My wife was really keen on returning to Nova Scotia and taking part in the industry. So she trained as a winemaker at Brock Uni- versity and worked in Germany, France, New Zealand and Austria, and fortunately got a job at a vineyard in Nova Scotia about 10 years ago. I was doing my PhD in Germany at the time studying human genetics. So I switched to Agricultural genetics because I thought, if I want to follow my wife, I better study some- thing that grows nearby! So I started my post-doc at Cornell University in grape genetics. So it was a meeting of two academic minds? Well, we also like to cook and we like to drink wine, and you’ll never be bored with those two things as a hobby. You could never possibly explore all the different wines and cuisines that the world has to offer. When we moved back here to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, I got a job and started to work on apples. I became an apple researcher working on apple breeding.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • OCTOBER 2017
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